As Long as You Name My Name Right:
Social Circles and Social Sentiment in the Hollywood Hearings
Oren Tsur†§
Dan Calacci†
orentsur@seas.harvard.edu
†
§
dcalacci@ccs.neu.edu
d.lazer@neu.edu
Lazer Laboratory, Northeastern University
School of Engeneering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
❜
Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University
Abstract
can be applied in many social and political settings
beyond the online world. Two examples are the
study of power structures in arguments before the
U.S. Supreme Court (Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et
al., 2012) and the evolution of specific words and
phrases over time as reflected in Google Books
(Goldberg and Orwant, 2013).
In this paper we propose using network science
and linguistic analysis in order to understand the
social dynamics in the entertainment industry during one of its most controversial periods – the ‘red
scare’ and the witch hunt for Communists in Hollywood during 1950’s.
The Hollywood Blacklist was based on
a series of interviews conducted by the
House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), trying to identify members
of the communist party. We use various
NLP algorithms in order to automatically
analyze a large corpus of interview transcripts and construct a network of the industry members and their “naming” relations. We further use algorithms for Sentiment Analysis in order to add a psychological dimension to the edges in the network.
In particular, we test how different types
of connections are manifested by different
sentiment types and attitude of the interviewees. Analysis of the language used in
the hearings can shed new light on the motivation and role of network members.
1
David Lazer† ❜
Historical background The Hollywood hearings (often confused with Senator McCarthy’s
hearings and allegations) were a series of interviews conducted by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC) in the years 1947–
1956. The purpose of the committee was to
conduct “hearings regarding the communist infiltration of the motion picture industry” (from
the HUAC Annual Report). The committee subpoenaed witnesses such as Ayn Rand (writer),
Arthur Miller (writer), Walt Disney (producer), future U.S. president Ronald Reagan (Screen Actors
Guild), Elia Kazan (writer, actor, director) and Albert Maltz (Screen Writers Guild). Some of the
witnesses were ‘friendly’ while some others were
uncooperative1 , refusing to “name names” or self
incriminate2 . Those who were named and/or were
uncooperative were often jailed or effectively lost
their job.
Arguably, many friendly witnesses felt they
were complying with their patriotic duty. Many
Introduction
A growing body of computational research is
focused on how language is used and how it
shapes/is shaped by a community of speakers.
Computational works in the nexus of language
and the social arena deal with various topics such
as language accommodation (Danescu-NiculescuMizil and Lee, 2011; Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
et al., 2011), demographic language variation
(Eisenstein et al., 2010; O’Connor et al., 2010),
the factors that facilitate the spread of information
in Q&A forums and social networks (Adamic et
al., 2008; Bian et al., 2009; Romero et al., 2011) or
the correlation between words and social actions
(Adali et al., 2012).
All of these works analyze the language and the
social dynamics in online communities, mainly
due to the increasing popularity of online social
networks and greater availability of such data.
However, large scale socio-linguistic analysis
should not be restricted to online communities and
1
A note about terminology: by using the terms friendly
and uncooperative there is no implied moral judgment – these
are the terms used in the literature.
2
It should be noted that being a member of the Communist
party was not illegal, however, some individuals avoided self
“incrimination” either in an effort to protect their job or as
an ideological declaration in favor of privacy protection as a
civil right protected by the constitution.
83
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Social Dynamics and Personal Attributes in Social Media, pages 83–87,
Baltimore, Maryland USA, 27 June 2014. c 2014 Association for Computational Linguistics
others were threatened or simply manipulated to
name names, and some later admitted to cooperating for other reasons such as protecting their
work or out of personal vendettas and professional
jealousies. It is also suspected that some naming occurred due to increasing professional tension between some producers and the Screen Writers Guild or (Navasky, 2003).
(a)
A snippet from the testimony of Elia Kazan, (actor, writer and director, 3
times Academy Awards winner), 4.10.1952.
Motivation In this work we analyze a collection
of HUAC hearings. We wish to answer the following questions:
1. Do sentiment and other linguistic categories
correlate with naming relations?
2. Can we gain any insight on the social dynamics between the people in the network?
(b)
A snippet from the testimony of Harold Ashe’s (journalist) testimony 9.1719.1951.
3. Does linguistic and network analysis support
any of the social theories about dynamics at
Hollywood during that time?
In order to answer the questions above we build
a social graph of members of the entertainment industry based on the hearings and add sentiment labels on the graph edges. Layering linguistic features on a the social graph may provide us with
new insights related to the questions at hand. In
this short paper we describe the research framework, the various challenges posed by the data and
present some initial promising results.
2
(c)
Figure 1: Snippets from HUAC hearings and an
annual report.
the documents the OCR output is noisy, containing misidentified characters, wrong alignment of
sentences and missing words. These problems introduce complications in tasks like named entity
recognition and properly parsing sentences.
Beyond the low graphic quality of the documents, the hearings present the researcher with the
typical array of NLP challenges. For example, the
hearing excerpt in 1(b) contains four dialogue acts
that need to be separated and processed. The committee member (Mr. Tavenner) mentions the name
Stanley Lawrence, later referred to by the witness
(Mr. Ashe) as Mr. Lawrence and he thus coreference resolution is required before the graph construction and the sentiment analysis phases.
As a preprocessing stage we performed named
entity recognition (NER), disambiguation and unification. For the NER task we used the Stanford
NER (Finkel et al., 2005) and for disambiguation
and unification we used a number of heuristics
based on edit distance and name distribution.
Data
In this work we used two types of datasets: Hearing Transcripts and Annual Reports. Snippets
from hearings can be found in Figures 1(a) and
1(b), Figure 1(c) shows a snippet from an annual
report. The transcripts data is based on 47 interviews conducted by the HUAC in the years 1951–
2. Each interview is either a long statement (1(a) )
or a sequence of questions by the committee members and answers by a witness (1(b)). In total, our
hearings corpus consists of 2831 dialogue acts and
half a million words.
3
A snippet from 1951 annual report.
Named Entity Recognition and
Anaphora Resolution
The snippets in Figure 1 illustrates some of the
challenges in processing HUAC data. The first
challenge is introduced by the low quality of the
available documents. Due to the low quality of
84
We used the Stanford Deterministic Coreference Resolution System (Lee et al., 2011) to resolve anaphoric references.
4
Num of nodes
Num of edges
Nodes / Edges
Avg. out degree
Avg. in degree
Var(outdegree)
Var(indegree)
Nodes with out going edges
Nodes with incoming edges
Reciprocity
Naming Graph vs. Mentions Graph
In building the network graph of the members of
the entertainment industry we distinguish between
mentioning and naming in our data. While many
names may be mentioned in a testimony (either by
a committee member or by the witness, see example in Figures 1(a) and 1(b)), not all names are
practically ‘named’ (=identified) as Communists.
We thus use the hearings dataset in order to build
a social graph of mentions (MG) and the annual reports are used to build a naming graph (NG). The
NG is used as a “gold standard” in the analysis
of the sentiment labels in the MG. Graph statistics
are presented in Table 1.
While the hearings are commonly perceived as
an “orgy of informing” (Navasky, 2003), the difference in network structure of the graphs portrays
a more complex picture. The striking difference in
the average out degree suggests that while many
names were mentioned in the testimonies (either
in a direct question or in an answer) – majority of
the witnesses avoided mass-explicit naming3 . The
variance in outdegree suggests that most witnesses
did not cooperate at all or gave only a name or
two, while only a small number of witnesses gave
a long list of names. These results are visually
captured in the intersection graph (Figure 2) and
were also manually verified.
The difference between the MG and the NG
graph in the number of nodes with out-going edges
(214 vs. 66) suggests that the HUAC used other
informers that were not subpoenaed to testify in a
hearing4 .
In the remainder of this paper we analyze the the
distribution of the usage of various psychological
categories based on the role the witnesses play.
5
MG
1353
2434
0.55
36.87
1.82
3902.62
4.0
66
1341
0.016
NG
631
842
0.467
3.93
1.83
120.75
2.51
214
459
0.012
Intersection
122
113
1
8.7
1.04
415.59
1.04
13
109
0
Table 1: Network features of the Mentions graph,
the Naming graph and the intersection of the
graphs.
Figure 2: Naming graph based on the intersection of the mentions and the naming data. Larger
node size indicates a bigger out degree; Color indicates the in degree (darker nodes were named
more times).
cal setting we combine (Ding et al., 2008) and the
LIWC lexicon (Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010).
In the statistical setting we use NaSent (Socher et
al., 2013).
The motivation to use both methods is twofold:
first – while statistical models are generally more
robust, accurate and sensitive to context, they require parsing of the processed sentences. Parsing
our data is often problematic due to the noise introduced by the OCR algorithm due to the poor
quality of the documents (see Figure 1). We expected the lexicon-based method to be more tolerant to noisy or ill-structured sentences. We opted
for the LIWC since it offers an array of sentiment
and psychological categories that might be relevant in the analysis of such data.
Sentiment Analysis and Psychological
Categories
5.1 Sentiment Analysis
We performed the sentiment analysis in two different settings: lexical and statistical. In the lexi3
Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan, two of the most ‘friendly’
witnesses (appeared in front of the HUAC in 1947), did not
name anyone.
4
There might be some hearings and testimonies that are
classified or still not publicly accessible.
85
Stanford
75
254
Pos
Neg
LIWC
292
37
Table 2: Confusion matrix for Stanford and LIWC
sentiment algorithms.
Aggregated Sentiment A name may be mentioned a number of times in a single hearing, each
time with a different sentiment type or polarity.
The aggregated sentiment weight of a witness i toward a mentioned name j is computed as follows:
sentiment(i, j) = max
c∈CAT
P
k∈Uij
score(uk
ij , c)
|Uij |
Figure 3: Frequencies of selected LIWC categories in friendly vs. uncooperative testimonies.
(1)
Category
Cogmech
Excl
I
Insight
job
Negate
Other
Preps
Pronouns
Self
Social
Tentat
You
Where CAT is the set of categories used by
LIWC or Stanford Sentiment and Uij is the set
of all utterances (dialogue acts) in which witness
i mentions the name j. The score() function is
defined slightly different for each setting. In the
LIWC setting we define scorekas:
k
score(uij , c) =
|{w ∈ uij |w ∈ c}|
|uk
ij |
(2)
In the statistical setting, Stanford Sentiment returns a sentiment category and a weight, we there(
fore use:
k
score(uij , c)
=
wc , if sentiment f ound
0,
if c was not returned
Typical Words
abandon, accept, avoid, admit, know, question
although, besides, but, except
I, I’d, I’ll, I’m, I’ve, me, mine, my, myself
accept, acknowledge, conclude, know, rational
work, position, benefit, duty
no, nope, nothing, neither, never, isn’t , can’t
he, him, herself, them
about, against, along, from, outside, since
I, anybody, anyone, something, they, you
I, mine, ours, myself, us
acquaintance, admit, party, comrade, confess, friend, human
ambiguous, tentative, undecided, depend, hesitant, guess
thou, thoust, thy, y’all, ya, ye, you, you’d
Table 3: LIWC categories and examples of typical
words
(3)
Unfortunately, both approaches to sentiment
analysis were not as useful as expected. Most
graph edges did not have any sentiment label, either due to the limited sentiment lexicon of the
LIWC or due to the noise induced in the OCR
process, preventing the Stanford Sentiment engine
from parsing many of the sentences. Interestingly,
the two approaches did not agree on most sentences (or dialogue acts). The sentiment confusion matrix is presented in Table 2, illustrating the
challenge posed by the data.
6
Conclusion and Future Work
In this short paper we take a computational approach in analyzing a collection of HUAC hearings. We combine Natural Language Processing and Network Science techniques in order to
gain a better understanding of the social dynamics within the entertainment industry in its darkest time. While sentiment analysis did not prove
as useful as expected, analysis of network structures and the language usage in an array of psychological dimensions reveals differences between
friendly and uncooperative witnesses.
Future work should include a better preprocessing of the data, which is also expected to improve
the sentiment analysis. In future work we will analyze the language use in a finer granularity of witness categories, such as the ideological informer,
the naive informer and the vindictive informer. We
also hope to expand the hearings corpora to include testimonies from more years.
5.2 Psychological Categories
The LIWC lexicon contains more than just positive/negative categories. Table 3 presents a sample
of LIWC categories and associated tokens. Figure 3 presents the frequencysave in which each
psychological category is used by friendly and uncooperative witnesses. While the Pronoun category is equally used by both parties, the uncooperative witnesses tend to use the I, Self and You categories while the friendly witnesses tend to use the
Other and Social. A somewhat surprising result
is that the Tentat category is used more by friendly
witnesses – presumably reflecting their discomfort
with their position as informers.
References
Sibel Adali, Fred Sisenda, and Malik Magdon-Ismail.
2012. Actions speak as loud as words: Predicting
86
relationships from social behavior data. In Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World
Wide Web, pages 689–698. ACM.
Computational Natural Language Learning: Shared
Task, pages 28–34. Association for Computational
Linguistics.
Lada A Adamic, Jun Zhang, Eytan Bakshy, and Mark S
Ackerman. 2008. Knowledge sharing and yahoo
answers: everyone knows something. In Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World
Wide Web, pages 665–674. ACM.
Victor S Navasky. 2003. Naming Names: With a New
Afterword by the Author. Macmillan.
Brendan O’Connor, Jacob Eisenstein, Eric P Xing, and
Noah A Smith. 2010. A mixture model of demographic lexical variation. In Proceedings of NIPS
workshop on machine learning in computational social science, pages 1–7.
Jiang Bian, Yandong Liu, Ding Zhou, Eugene
Agichtein, and Hongyuan Zha. 2009. Learning to
recognize reliable users and content in social media
with coupled mutual reinforcement. In Proceedings
of the 18th international conference on World Wide
Web, pages 51–60. ACM.
Daniel M Romero, Brendan Meeder, and Jon Kleinberg. 2011. Differences in the mechanics of information diffusion across topics: idioms, political hashtags, and complex contagion on twitter. In
Proceedings of the 20th international conference on
World wide web, pages 695–704. ACM.
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Lillian Lee.
2011. Chameleons in imagined conversations: A
new approach to understanding coordination of linguistic style in dialogs. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational
Linguistics, ACL 2011.
Richard Socher, Alex Perelygin, Jean Wu, Jason
Chuang, Christopher D. Manning, Andrew Y. Ng,
and Christopher Potts. 2013. Recursive deep models for semantic compositionality over a sentiment
treebank. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1631–1642, Stroudsburg, PA, October.
Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Michael Gamon,
and Susan Dumais. 2011. Mark my words! Linguistic style accommodation in social media. In
Proceedings of WWW, pages 745–754.
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee,
Bo Pang, and Jon Kleinberg. 2012. Echoes of
power: Language effects and power differences in
social interaction. In Proceedings of WWW, pages
699–708.
Yla R. Tausczik and James W. Pennebaker. 2010. The
Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29(1):24–54, March.
Xiaowen Ding, Bing Liu, and Philip S. Yu. 2008. A
holistic lexicon-based approach to opinion mining.
In Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference
on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM ’08, pages
231–240, New York, NY, USA. ACM.
Jacob Eisenstein, Brendan O’Connor, Noah A Smith,
and Eric P Xing. 2010. A latent variable model
for geographic lexical variation. In Proceedings of
the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1277–1287. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Jenny Rose Finkel, Trond Grenager, and Christopher
Manning. 2005. Incorporating non-local information into information extraction systems by gibbs
sampling. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics,
pages 363–370. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Yoav Goldberg and Jon Orwant. 2013. Syntacticngrams over time from a very large corpus of english
books. In Second Joint Conference on Lexical and
Computational Semantics.
Heeyoung Lee, Yves Peirsman, Angel Chang,
Nathanael Chambers, Mihai Surdeanu, and Dan Jurafsky. 2011. Stanford’s multi-pass sieve coreference resolution system at the conll-2011 shared
task. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on
87